Picture Music

CMPS 161 Winter 2014

 Eric Anderson

Most of the visualizations of data today are developed in eye-catching illustrative simulations. This is largely in fact due to computers’ abilities to process visual data quickly. Not much work has been put into the visualization of data through sound.

This project is meant to develop a coherent stream of music from picture-data of sufficiently high resolution through several different analysis of the picture data. As with many picture formats, raw picture data only consists of color (RGB) data, and their pixel coordinates. From this, several things can be derived. Such things include, but are not limited to gradient, statistical means and modes, and number of distinct colors. Much of this data is already used for photo and image editing programs such as Photoshop.

Visualizing “seen” data as “heard” data is something that has yet to be perfected for humans to adopt. Although sound may be a data-medium we use further into the future, it has yet to be explored.